The present invention relates to the field of replacing a patient's tooth with a replica thereof.
During the process of replacing a lost tooth, the task of the dentist, working with a dental laboratory, is to produce a good visual match between the patient's original tooth and the replica made up by the laboratory. To date, there has been no really accurate shade matching capability in the dental field. Various devices employed by the dentists to attain this match involve use of a red, green and blue colorimeter, a visual matching comparator, and the standard set of acrylic or porcelain shade tabs used by virtually every dentist practising in the crown and bridge field. It is thus highly desirable to provide a method for accurately measuring the shade value of a tooth within the mouth of the patient and use the data resulting from the measurement of such tooth to select a matching recipe which appears under all lighting conditions to be reasonably close to the appearance of the original tooth. In the past, considerable inaccuracy in this matching process has resulted from essentially subjective evaluation of the dental color of the tooth. The dentist examines the tooth under variable lighting conditions which results in substantial errors in this matching process and, additionally, dentists are often color blind so that the resulting data sent to the laboratory technician is quite inaccurate.